Taiwan - Zhuqi Market Street, The Little Person

Those who know my wife often comment on how tiny she is.  And she is tiny - at 5'2" barely a hundred pounds.

But this little thing caught my attention.  We were getting off the bus to go shopping one day and she walked past from the back before I rose to get out of my seat.  I noticed right away that the top of her head was not even as high as the seatbacks as she made her way down the aisle.  From that moment I ached to get a picture but didn't want to gawk, make a spectacle of her, or otherwise offend in some way.  I watched sadly as she disappeared in the crowd of shoppers, thinking that here was "another one that got away".

Fortunately the fates gave me another chance.  The next day we ran into her on the street and she stopped to visit...turns out she was born and raised in a valley adjacent to the one in which Chenjean lived, they were about the same age and had mutual acquaintances, etc.

So I'm standing there watching this, wondering how to get a picture without making my fascination at her size obvious, when I noticed several things about her...

One was that she had a very pleasant, cheerful, even joyful personality that took the greatest pleasure in her interactions with others.  Her smiling face radiated sunshine that sliced through even the dismally hot and gloomy climate that so often pervades the weather of Taiwan.  One of the people that makes you feel good just being around her.

Another was that she was proportioned normally, unlike midgets or other small people.  And her voice was perfectly normal; if you didn't see her, hearing her speak would not betray that she was any different from a normally-sized individual.

Lastly, while they talked, she became very animated and kept glancing my way.  As it turns out, she was just as fascinated by me as I was with her, and was asking Chenjean a multitude of questions about our lives and how she met this American.

So goes with the time I met a truly tiny person.  And not unlike the experience described in the last paragraph of this post, I'll remember our acquaintance more because of the fullness of her heart than the difference in her appearance.

Oh, and by the way she was fine with pictures!  From the photo above I was able to measure her height (3'9").  Family portrait below: